A real champion of academic freedom

Facebook posts by leftist "friends" are often my starting point for a pursuit of the core truth of a given news story.

Such was the case with this claim in an AP article that Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor and now president of Purdue University, had engaged in some kind of general "censorship" of textbooks for the state's public universities and high schools.  Several people trumpeted the piece, and I smelled a certain kind of odor wafting from their common outrage.

All one had to do was read the AP story to see that the headline and lede were misleading.  This wasn't about general censorship; it was about the most dangerous, reprehensible, ideologically filthy book currently being used - and is it ever being used - in the nation's history departments, namely, A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

The waiting period between when this kind of thing first surfaces and when a proper defense of the target of the news story appears can be frustrating.  Such was the case here, but the wait is finally over. Roger Kimball at PJ Media offers up a full-throated hurrah for what Daniels did.

Note well, Daniels doesn’t say Zinn’s book oughtn’t to be allowed to be published. He doesn’t want to censor the book. He merely says it shouldn’t be taught as history.  He would, I’d wager, say the same thing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  And he’d be right.

The Left is skirling that Mitch Daniels wants to deny academic freedom. No, he wants to support it. But he understands that academic freedom is not a license to engage in political propaganda. It is the freedom to pursue the truth. This is a point that Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, gets exactly right.  “Academic freedom,” Wood writes in a column on the controversy for The Chronicle of Higher Education,  ”is a principle that thrives only when it is sturdily woven together with academic responsibility. That’s what Daniels in his plain-speaking e-mails called for.”

[snip]

Academic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. It is a more limited freedom, designed to nurture intellectual integrity and to protect those engaged in intellectual inquiry from the intrusion of partisan passions. The very limitation of academic freedom is part of its strength. By excluding the political, it makes room for the pursuit of truth.

I think I'll do a little Facebook posting of my own.